The Dragonfly Effect

People are clamoring for ways to use social media for social change. Two veterans of consumer psychology, marketing, and entrepreneurship say there is a replicable framework to achieve this ambitious goal.

Sameer Bhatia was always good
with numbers. When he was in his 20s, the Stanford University grad came up with an
innovative algorithm that formed the foundation of MonkeyBin, his
popular consumer barter marketplace. By 31, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur
was newly married and running a mobile gaming company.

Then, on a routine business trip to Mumbai, Bhatia started to feel
under the weather. He lost his appetite and had trouble breathing.
Bhatia chalked it up to the 100-degree weather and unbearable humidity.
After a visit to a doctor at one of Mumbai’s leading hospitals,
however, blood tests showed that Bhatia’s white blood cell count was
wildly out of whack, and there were “blasts” in his cells. His doctor instructed
him to return home to seek medical treatment. Upon entering
the United States, Bhatia was admitted to the Robert Wood Johnson
University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. He was diagnosed with
Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML), a cancer that starts in the bone
marrow and is characterized by the rapid growth of abnormal white
blood cells that interfere with the production of normal blood cells.
AML is the most common acute leukemia affecting adults.

Bhatia was facing the toughest challenge of his life. Half of all new
cases of leukemia result in death. But Bhatia was determined to beat
the odds and get better. After a few months of chemotherapy and
other pharmacological treatment, doctors told Bhatia that his only
remaining treatment option would be a bone marrow transplant—a procedure that requires finding a donor with marrow having the
same human leukocyte antigens as the recipient.

Because tissue types are inherited, about 25 percent to 30 percent
of patients are able to find a perfect match with a sibling. The
remaining 70 percent must turn to the National Marrow Donor
Program (NMDP), a national database with more than 8 million
registered individuals.

Patients requiring a transplant are most likely to match a donor
of their own ethnicity. That wasn’t a promising scenario for Bhatia.
He had a rare gene from his father’s side of the family that proved
extremely difficult to match. After typing his brother, his parents,
and all of his cousins, the closest they got was a 2/8 match. Even
more worrisome was that of the millions of registered donors in
the NMDP, only 1.4 percent are South Asian. As a result, the odds
of Bhatia finding a perfect match were 1 in 20,000. Worse, there
were few other places to look. One would think that a match could
be found easily in India, where Bhatia’s family was originally from.
But India does not have a national bone marrow registry. Not a
single match surfaced anywhere.

Bhatia’s quest to find a donor match is a tale of the revolutionary
power of social technology. Most of us are inundated daily with
e-mails, videos, blog posts, and online invitations to participate in
campaigns—pleas we generally ignore. Yet some social media-driven
campaigns are so compelling that they beat incredible odds or cause
millions to act. We call this phenomenon of using social technology
for impact the “Dragonfly Effect.” It is a method that coalesces
the focal points of our careers—research and insights on consumer
psychology and happiness with practical approaches for infectious
action. The Dragonfly Effect is also an outgrowth of a class taught at
the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which brought together
students engaged in social media and an ecosystem of collaborators
including Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors, and faculty and
students from Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Not
only did the class demonstrate that people are clamoring for ways
to use social media for social good, but it also confirmed our belief
that there is a replicable framework to achieve this goal.

Why the dragonfly? The dragonfly is the only insect able to propel
itself in any direction when its four wings are working in concert.
It symbolizes the importance of integrated effect and is akin to the
ripple effect—a term used in economics, sociology, and psychology
to indicate how small acts can create big change. To us, the Dragonfly
Effect shows how synchronized ideas can be used to create rapid
transformations through social media.

The method relies on four essential skills, or wings: 1) focus:
identify a single concrete and measurable goal; 2) grab attention:
cut through the noise of social media with something authentic
and memorable; 3) engage: create a personal connection, accessing
higher emotions, compassion, empathy, and happiness; and 4) take
action: enable and empower others to take action. Throughout this
process, we use the tools of design thinking, a creative approach to
experimenting with and building up ideas.1 Design thinking meshes
with the Dragonfly method because it quickly takes people through
a series of steps, starting with empathy and moving to hypothesis
creation and then to rapid prototyping and testing.

Wing 1: Focus Your Goal
Bhatia’s circle of friends, a group of young entrepreneurs and professionals,
reacted to the news of his diagnosis with an unconventional
approach. “We realized our choices were between doing something,
anything, and doing something seismic,” says Robert Chatwani,
Bhatia’s best friend and business partner. The friends decided they
would attack Bhatia’s illness as they would any business challenge. It
came down to running the numbers. If they campaigned for Bhatia
and held bone marrow drives throughout the country, they could
increase the number of South Asians in the registry. The only challenge
was that to play the odds they had to register 20,000 South Asians. They figured that this was the only way to find the match
that would save his life. The only problem: Doctors told them that
they had a matter of weeks to get the job done.

Bhatia’s friends and family (Team Sameer) needed to work fast
and they needed to scale up. Their strategy: tap the power of the
Internet and focus on the tight-knit South Asian community to get
20,000 South Asians into the bone marrow registry, immediately.
One of Chatwani’s first steps was to write an e-mail with a clear
call to action. In the message, he did not ask for help; he simply told
people what was needed of them.

Dear Friends,
Please take a moment to read this email. My friend, Sameer Bhatia,
has been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), which is
a cancer of the blood. He is in urgent need of a bone marrow transplant.
Sameer is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is 31 years old, and got married
last year. His diagnosis was confirmed just weeks ago and caught us all
by surprise given that he has always been in peak condition.
Sameer, a Stanford alum, is known to many for his efforts in launching
the American India Foundation, Project Dosti, TiE (Chicago), a microfinance
fund, and other causes focused on helping others. Now he
urgently needs our help in giving him a new lease on life. He is undergoing
chemotherapy at present but needs a bone marrow transplant to sustain
beyond the next few months.
Fortunately, you can help. Let’s use the power of the Net to save a life.2

Robert then instructed readers to do three things. First, he urged
them to get registered through a simple cheek swab test. He gave a
link to locations where this could be done. Second, he told readers
to spread the word. Third, he instructed people to learn more by
visiting the website set up to help Bhatia. On it were more details on
how to organize one’s own drive and information about AML, plus
frequently asked questions on registering. Robert sent the e-mail
to Bhatia’s closest friends and business colleagues—about 400 to
500 people, including fellow entrepreneurs, investors, South Asian
relatives, and college friends. And that set of friends forwarded the
e-mail to their personal networks, and so on. Within 48 hours, the
e-mail had reached 35,000 people.

Bhatia’s friends soon learned that yet another man in their ecosystem
had recently been diagnosed with the same disease—Vinay
Chakravarthy, a Boston-based 28-year-old physician. Bhatia’s friends
immediately partnered with Team Vinay, an inspiring group of people
who shared the same goal as Team Sameer. Together, they harnessed
Web 2.0 social media platforms and services like Facebook, Google
Apps, and YouTube to collectively campaign and hold bone marrow
drives all over the country.

Their goal was clear and their campaign was under way. Within
weeks, in addition to the national drives, Team Sameer and Team
Vinay coordinated bone marrow drives at more than 15 San
Francisco Bay Area companies, including Cisco, Google, Intel, Oracle,
eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, and Genentech. Volunteers on the East Coast
started using the documents and collateral that the teams developed.
After 11 weeks of focused efforts that included 480 bone marrow
drives, 24,611 new people were registered. The teams recruited
3,500 volunteers, achieved more than 1 million media impressions,
and garnered 150,000 visitors to the websites. “This is the biggest
campaign we’ve ever been involved with,” says Asia Blume of the
Asian American Donor Program. “Other patients might register
maybe a thousand donors. We never imagined that this campaign
would blow up to this extent.”

Perhaps the most critical result associated with the campaign,
however, was the discovery of two matches: one for Bhatia, one
for Chakravarthy. In August 2007—only a few months after the
kickoff of the campaign—Chakravarthy found a close match. Two
weeks later, Bhatia was notified of the discovery of a perfect 10 of
10 match. Judging from the timing of when the donors entered the
database, both Chakravarthy and Bhatia’s matches were a direct
result of the campaigns.

One of the main reasons Team Sameer succeeded was its ability
to focus. They didn’t get lost in the size of their challenge. They
didn’t try to sign up every single South Asian in the San Francisco
Bay Area. Instead they focused on those who were well connected to
others and who could relate to Bhatia and his story. Those types of
people were easy to identify, and the scope of the challenge quickly
came into focus. Perhaps most incredible was that Team Sameer
and Team Vinay did not stop with just Bhatia and Chakravarthy.
Ultimately, Team Sameer and Team Vinay educated a population
about the value of becoming registered donors while changing the
way registries work. Above all, they came up with a blueprint for
saving lives—one that could be replicated.

Wing 2: Grab Attention
Not every social media campaign can grab attention through life-or-
death stories. Most need to impress through originality or take
people by surprise. Consider the Coca-Cola Co. In 2009 the company
was looking for a new way to connect to young consumers. Spending
on traditional media or Super Bowl ads would be predictable.
Instead, they veered far from what could have been anticipated and
delivered the “Happiness Machine.” Just before final exams, Coke
installed a vending machine in a cafeteria at St. John’s University
in Queens, N.Y. Instead of dispensing normal sodas, however, the
machine dispensed surprises. When a student paid for one Coke,
she got many Cokes … and then got other treats as well: flowers, a
pizza, balloon animals, and even a 10-foot sandwich.

The students in the cafeteria were delighted by the surprises,
which brought out the best in them. They shared the treats with
fellow students. Coke posted a video on YouTube and advertised
it with a single tweet: “Would you like a Coca-Cola Happiness Machine?
Share the happiness … share the video.” 3 Within two weeks,
the video had been watched 2 million times. Although traditional
Coke ads, such as those placed on American Idol, would gain greater
reach, Coke’s initial data suggest that the Happiness Machine has
had a more meaningful impact on consumers. Coke spent less than
$50,000 on the video and proved the power of surprise as a tool to
establish a deep emotional connection.

Or consider Nike, which in early 2010 partnered with social marketer
(RED) to launch the (RED) laces campaign on World AIDS Day.
Nike created eye-catching (RED) shoelaces, donating 100 percent
of the sale proceeds to fight AIDS. Working with Twitter, they put
an item on the Twitter homepage promoting the movement and turned the text of all tweets red that included the hashtag #red or # laceupsavelives.4 To ignite the Twitter community, they enlisted
celebrities such as Serena Williams, John Legend, Ashton Kutcher,
and Chris Rock to send the following tweet (or their own variation):
“Today is World AIDS Day. Together we can fight AIDS thru sports,
www.nikefootball.com/red #red #laceupsavelives.” Nike essentially
staged a virtual flashmob with the help of these influencers who
were connected to millions of people. Within one day, they reached
more than 10 million people with their message, turned more than a
half million tweets red through the use of the promotion’s hashtags,
and made World AIDS Day a top five global trending topic on Twitter,
driving sales of the (RED) laces and ensuring further reach well
beyond the followers of a particular set of influencers.

When working to grab attention in a social media campaign, we
suggest four design principles: 1)personal: create with a personal
hook in mind; 2) unexpected: people like consuming and then sharing
new information—draw them in by piquing their curiosity; 3) visual:
show, don’t tell—photos and videos speak millions of words; and 4)
visceral: design the campaign so it triggers the senses through sight,
sound, hearing, or taste.

Wing 3: Engage
If Wing 2 of the Dragonfly Effect is about getting people to notice
your cause, Wing 3, Engage, is about what happens next—compelling
people to care deeply. Engage is arguably the most challenging
of the four wings, because engaging others is more of an art than a
science. Engagement has little to do with logic or reason. You might
have brilliant arguments to explain why people
should get involved, but if you can’t engage
them emotionally, they won’t be swayed.

Barack Obama’s 2008 run for the White
House is perhaps the broadest campaign to
successfully use social media for social change.
Obama’s team effectively used new social media
tools—and according to some experts, this
bold move secured him the presidency. Analysts
at Edelman Research say that Obama won
by “converting everyday people into engaged
and empowered volunteers, donors, and advocates
through social networks, e-mail advocacy,
text messaging, and online video.” 5

Although Obama’s grassroots effort was
savvy at using a wide variety of existing social
media and technology tools, its central channel
was My.BarackObama.com (nicknamed
MyBO). In many ways this easy-to-use networking
website was like a more focused version
of Facebook. It allowed Obama supporters
to create a profile, build groups, connect, and
chat with other registered users, find or plan
offline events, and raise funds. MyBO also
housed such user-generated content as videos,
speeches, photos, and how-to guides that allowed people to create their own content—similar to a digital
toolbox. The mission, design, and execution of the site echoed the
single goal of the grassroots effort: to provide a variety of ways for
people to connect and become involved.

The Obama team, which created the most robust set of online
tools ever used in a political campaign, did so in less than 10 days,
timing the site to launch around Obama’s presidential campaign announcement.
Keeping focused on one clear mission (“involvement
through empowerment”) helped them not only to execute fast but
also to execute right. In its core functionality, MyBO was the same
on launch day as it was on Election Day.

It was no coincidence that MyBO shared similarities with Facebook;
the Obama campaign had familiarized itself with Facebook
early on, first using it before the midterm elections. At that time,
Facebook had just started to allow political candidates to build profile
pages, and even though Obama wasn’t a midterm candidate, he
still wanted to harness online momentum. The campaign also hired
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to help it develop and execute
its social media strategy.

Hughes’s revolutionary contribution to MyBO was using social
media not just to capture people’s attention but also to enable them
to become activists (without a single field staffer telling them how).
These activists became a team—initially gathering online and then
coordinating offline events to evangelize their cause. MyBO integrated
behavioral truths (involvement leads to commitment; opportunity
leads to empowerment) and social media tools to inspire people
to participate in ways that they found meaningful and rewarding.
My.BarackObama.com was not merely a website; it was a movement
that made politics accessible through social media that people were already using every day. It changed the face of political campaigns
forever. But, more important, it made getting involved as easy as
opening up an Internet browser and creating an online profile.

Wing 4: Take Action
In many ways, Alex Scott was a regular kid. Her favorite food was
French fries, her favorite color blue. She hoped to be a fashion designer
one day. But in other ways, Scott was different. Just before her
first birthday, she was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, an aggressive
form of pediatric cancer. A tumor was removed from her back, and
doctors told her parents, Liz and Jay Scott, that if she beat the cancer
she would likely not walk again. Two weeks later Alex Scott moved
her leg—one of the many early clues about her determination and
capabilities. When Scott was 4, after receiving a stem cell transplant,
she came up with a plan that would change how she and her family
coped with cancer from then on. “When I get out of the hospital I
want to have a lemonade stand,” she said. Scott wanted to use the
money she made to fight cancer and help other children.

Her parents admit now that they laughed at Scott’s project. Although
one in every 330 American children contracts cancer before
age 20, childhood cancer research is consistently underfunded. Scott
was advised that it could be challenging to raise money 50 cents at
a time. “I don’t care. I’ll do it anyway,” she replied.

Like thousands of other junior entrepreneurs around the country,
Scott set up a table in her front yard and started selling paper
cups of lemonade to neighbors and passersby. Her hand-printed sign
advertised that all proceeds would go to childhood cancer research.
The 50-cent price of a glass of lemonade was ignored as customers
paid with bills ($1, $5, $10, and $20) and allowed her to keep the
change as a donation. Scott understood the importance of change
management, and the change really added up.

Scott raised more than $2,000 that first year. Her plan was far more
than a social entrepreneur’s desire to earn profits for a purpose; rather,
it empowered others to act for her cause. She reopened her stand for
business each summer, and news of its existence and worthy cause
spread far beyond her neighborhood, her town, and even her home
state of Pennsylvania. She leveraged that momentum and got others
to set up their own lemonade stands. Her approach was “sticky” in
more ways than one.6 Before long, lemonade stand fundraisers took
place in 50 states, plus Canada and France. Scott and her family appeared
on The Oprah Winfrey Show as well as The Today Show.

Not one to be easily daunted, Scott set a goal to raise $1 million
for cancer research. By the time she reached $700,000, Volvo of
North America stepped in and pledged to hold a fundraising event
to assure that the $1 million goal would be reached.

Four years after setting up her first lemonade stand, Scott succumbed
to cancer. She was 8. In her too-short life she raised $1 million
for cancer research, built awareness of the seriousness of childhood
cancer, and taught a generation of children (and their parents) about
the importance of abstract ideals like community and charity. She
also demonstrated that making a difference can be fun.

To carry on Scott’s legacy, her parents established a nonprofit
in her name, Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF). Since its
founding, the 501(c)(3) charity has inspired more than 10,000 volunteers
to set up more than 15,000 stands. It has raised in excess
of $27 million and donated to more than 100 research projects at
nearly 50 institutions in the United States. Scott assembled a band
of cancer-fighting evangelists (family, friends, neighbors, citizens,
and corporations) that was far more powerful than anyone, even
those closest to her, ever thought possible. At first, ALSF stayed
connected to its constituents through two electronic newsletters,
Million Dollar Monday and Freshly Squeezed Friday News, which included
updates and anecdotes from lemonade stands around the
country. No explicit appeal was made; they kept the news light and
fun. But when ALSF started branching into social media, it found
that the old rules didn’t apply. It engaged its community more directly
and frequently through Twitter alerts and Facebook posts.
With the help of social media—30,000 Twitter followers and 33,000
Facebook fans—the organization garnered a strong and faithful fan
base, growing exponentially. ALSF also redeployed its experience
to make it dead simple for anyone to hold a lemonade stand. Their
site (www.alexslemonade.org) documents, down to the last detail,
what one needs and includes downloadable templates and tools.
The foundation sends everyone who registers a package of ALSFbranded
materials, with banners, signs, posters, and flyers.

People all over the world took Scott’s idea and transformed it
into a movement. The success of Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation
wasn’t as much about raising money as it was inspiring people
to take action. The organization recognized that traditional fundraising
(dialing or dining for dollars) was a relatively passive act.
By helping children around the country set up their own lemonade
stands to fight childhood cancer, Scott mobilized a population of
young ambassadors whose involvement and heightened awareness
made a much more significant impact.

The organization embraced all four wings of the dragonfly: It
focused on the goal to honor Scott’s wish to raise money to fight
childhood cancer; it grabbed attention by tapping into a deep-rooted
American tradition, the lemonade stand; it engaged people’s emotions
by telling and retelling Scott’s compelling story. And finally, it
excelled at the fourth wing of the Dragonfly Effect, Take Action, the
wing critical to closing the loop on previous efforts.

Ultimately, the Dragonfly Effect demonstrates that one doesn’t
need money or power to cause seismic social change. With energy,
focus, and a good wireless connection, anything is possible.

This article is based on the book The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy
Smith (John Wiley & Sons, 2010).

Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at the Stanford
Graduate School of Business. She is widely published in scholarly journals in psychology
and marketing, and her work has been featured in The Economist, The New
York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR, among others.

Andy Smith is a principal of Vonavona Ventures, where he advises technical and
social ventures in marketing, consumer strategy, and operations. He is a guest lecturer
at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a contributor to Good Magazine.

6 Stickiness refers to a quality that the most successful ideas and endeavors have: that
of grabbing and holding attention. It's a concept that grew to maturity during the
dot-com era, fueled by Chip and Dan Heath's bestselling book Made to Stick: Why
Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, New York: Random House, 2007.